Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
You may have heard about this new smart home standard Matter and how it will make it easier to buy and set up connected gadgets. Not only that, but those gadgets should now work with any phone, voice assistant, or smart speaker, using any smart home platform — Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, or any other Matter-compatible option. If you got excited and went out and bought a new smart plug or smart light bulb to give this a whirl, you may have picked up one that uses Thread, one of the two wireless protocols Matter uses (the other is Wi-Fi). So, now what?
While Matter is supposed to make everything about the smart home easier, there are still some growing pains, especially regarding Thread — hey, the smart…